Are you using separate accounts per use case? That's the only real way to get a cost breakdown, otherwise you have no idea what piece of infrastructure is for what. They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly.

> The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more.

Not a bug, a feature.

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> If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you.

The point where you get sticker shock from AWS is often significantly lower than the point where you have enough money to hire in either of those roles. AWS is obviously the infrastructure of choice if you plan to scale. The problem is that scaling on expertise isn’t instant and that’s where you’re more likely to make a careless mistake and deploy something relatively costly.

> If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you.

What a baffling comment. Is it normal to even consider hiring someone to figure out how you are being billed by a service? You started with one problem and now you have at least two? And what kind of perverse incentive are you creating? Don't you think your "finops" person has a vested interest in preserving their job by ensuring billing complexity will always be there?

> If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you

At that point wouldn't it simply be cheaper to do VMs?

But they're also simple and cheap if you're a "one man band" trying out some personal idea that might or might not take off. Those people have no budgets for specialists.

Pricing schemes like these just make them move back to virtual machines with "unlimited" shared cpu usage and setting up services (db,...) manually.

They have clear numbers for things, but it's not obvious how those numbers would map to what you're trying to run.

If I charged compute based on the number of micro-ops executed then that would be a clear definition, but the actual cost would not be something you could predict, as it would depend on what architecture of CPU you ended up running it on.

AWS is even more complicated and variable than that as for cloud storage you have to deal with not only the costs of the different storage classes, but also early deletion fees, access charges, etc. Combined it makes it impractical to work out how much deleting a file from cloud storage will save (or cost). Sure you could probably calculate it if you knew the entire billing history of the file and the bucket it is in, but do you really want to do that every time you delete a file?

While I don't know enough to say if this is intentional, as it could result from simply blindly optimizing for profit, this sort of pricing model is anti-capitalistic as it prevents consumers from truly making informed decisions. We see the same thing is the US healthcare system, where no one can actually tell you how much an operation will cost ahead of time. That creates a very inefficient (but very profitable) market.